Amy Seimetz on ‘The Girlfriend Experience’: “We Wanted to Blow Open What a Limited Series Could Be”

Sunday night’s second-season premiere of The Girlfriend Experience on Starz marked a bold new direction for the series, which was a huge critical hit in its first season, particularly for the performance of Riley Keough as burgeoning call-girl Christine. But for season 2, creators Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan are embarking on a dual-storyline season following brand new characters and divided into two distinctly produced storylines. The episodes following Bria (Carmen Ejogo), a former escort currently in witness protection, have been written and directed by Seimetz, while the episodes following Anna (Louisa Krause) and Erica (Anna Friel) and a whole bunch of political intrigue are all written and directed by Kerrigan. Half-hour episodes from each storyline will air back-to-back Sunday nights, for seven weeks.

Amy Seimetz is not only the co-creator of The Girlfriend Experience but also one of the bright lights of indie cinema of the last decade. She wrote and directed (and was Gotham Award-nominated for) the moody and mysterious Sun Don’t Shine, starred in the enigmatic Upstream Color, and most recently can be seen on Stranger Things as Eleven’s aunt Becky.

Decider recently spoke to Seimetz about the Bria storyline (which sees the former escort drawn back into old habits, including a transactional relationship with the wealthy Paul, played by Spring Breakers filmmaker Harmony Korine), how the novel format of the season fits into the streaming landscape, and casting Carmen Ejogo as her lead actress while loudly fleeing alien killers.

Decider.com: Congratulations on the new season! To start off, what was the inspiration behind splitting season 2 into two storylines like this?

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Amy Seimetz: The only thing Steven asked us to do was to make it interesting and make it fresh at every turn. And so, the first season, Lodge and I wrote it together, and we came out with what you saw for the first season. And then in approaching the second season, we wanted to blow open the format of what a limited series could be. From the inception, we always wanted to explore a new character every single season in a new city, and we decided that it would be interesting for both Lodge and I as writer/directors to respectively write and direct seven and seven, which I’ve never seen that before on television; it seemed new and fun territory. And so we discussed some thematic elements that were similar and how to explore these thematic elements as individuals. So it was mostly just an experiment in pushing the envelope forward and blowing up television in a time where television seems to be moving very fast into new territory. Trying to figure out how to be a part of that was sort of the idea.

In writing for this show on Starz, and Starz having these multiple avenues for getting their shows to people, whether it be through the Amazon Prime channel or watching episodes in a big huge chunk later on, was there a sense of making the structure of the season something that could at some point be consumed all at once, or in a few different ways? Where you could watch all of Bria at some point or all of Erica and Anna and still watch it as they air? Does that make sense?

AS: Completely, yeah. I mean, yes. Our idea behind it was that we thought it was really exciting, the various ways people consume media. And then also, after the experience of last season, which we treated more like a movie than we did a television show, we played around with the fact that the audience was going to view this on a weekly basis as well as have the opportunity to binge watch once they dumped [the episodes] online. And we thought that it would be interesting for viewers to watch his episode and my episode paired back to back in an airing format so that [viewers] could draw the parallels and make connections that Lodge and I had been discussing thematically. And Lodge always talked about how we think that it’s human nature for viewers to draw parallels innately, and it would give the audience an opportunity to do that while it was airing. But also once it’s dumped, you can, if you want to, watch all 7 of his back to back, and if you want to watch all of mine, you can watch all of mine back to back, and you can sort of choose your own adventure. That was definitely interesting to us.

And Starz was on board with this and was encouraging of this?

AS: Yeah. I mean, they’re great. To applaud them, they really— I think it’s scary when you have filmmakers like me and Lodge who, after a successful first season, are like, “We don’t want to do anything like that! We want to blow up everything!” So I think that’s a little intimidating, and they could’ve been like, “Can you just use the successful formula of last season?” But no, they were on board. They were excited to. They’ve been so supportive and so excited to keep pushing it forward, which is good. I mean, you kind of have to be as a network now. There is no blueprint for what success is, [so] you have to really be supportive of the creator when people are like, “I want to try something new,” because it is new territory, and it’s just so competitive.

Do you feel like what you had to say about the themes of the show — escorting and sex work but also gender and power issues — do you think that changed at all from season 1 to season 2? Or evolved, or moved into something else?

AS: Yeah. I mean, last season it was what we considered an origin story for Christine. This season, I wanted to get away from an origin story and dig deeper into somebody who has been escorting for a while and that lifestyle and what sort of baggage that brings to the narrative. But I definitely think that gender politics play a role in both stories, in season 1 and season 2. But in this, I was much more interested in her identity as a woman who’s been stripped of her identity and only left with her feelings and doesn’t have … she quite literally is stripped of her identity by entering the witness protection program, and what does that mean and what roles do men and women project onto Bria’s character.

Can you talk a little bit about casting Carmen Ejogo in the lead role? Did casting her on this show came before or after you two starred in Alien: Covenant together?

AS: Before I killed her in Alien: Covenant? [laughs] Um, no. Carmen Cuba, our casting director, before I had even started writing, she said, “I have somebody who’s really interesting who I want you to take a look at.” Just an idea, and we were starting to spitball ideas about who could play who. I had a very rough idea of what I wanted for the [Bria] character, and I really wanted a woman who was very strong and had a strong presence and was highly intelligent and humorous but also extremely sensual, but not in an overtly sexual way, just sensual in general. And so she sent me some tape on Carmen, and I was like, “Yes!” And I Skyped with her and talked with her, and I knew that I wanted her from the beginning. And then magically we got cast in Alien, so I got to sweet talk her into doing it. In between takes of us screaming and running, it was me doing my elevator pitch to Carmen to do the show.

That’s fantastic. Also I wanted to ask about casting Harmony Korine as Paul? He’s such an interesting presence, coming from the indie film world. Did it feel like having his energy there continued the spirit of independent television making?

AS: Completely. That was a really hard role to cast because on the page, it is so zany in a way. And normalizing that and making it a real person, it was really difficult to imagine who could embody that without allowing it to be as weird and unpredictable as it is while still grounding it in human emotion. And as soon as Carmen Cuba and I said his name, we were like, “That’s the best idea.” So we asked him, and he said yes, and I can’t imagine that part being anyone else now. He’s so great. He’s such a live wire as a human being. Like he kind of has the energy of a teenage boy fluttering around. And he’s so great to work with as a director. When we do scenes and I’m directing him, he really just–he finds the ins and outs of the scenes and is exploring and is going off script trying to find new ways to attack the scene. And then eventually, through that exploration, he eventually comes back to the script and brings all that energy to work on the page, and it’s a really interesting approach; it’s a very writerly way to approach a scene. You know? To understand through going off on tangents and then coming back to the words that are scripted, it’s a very writerly approach to crack a scene, and just, yeah. And in general, just in his movies and embodying that character who is pretty unpredictable and weird, it’s also such an embodiment of his films, which are so weird but grounded. But yeah. He’s awesome. He was such a pleasure to work with.

Does this show, or this season, or even specifically Bria’s storyline with its themes of power imbalance and abuse of power in certain settings, do you feel like that’s all taken on a different significance, or a greater significance, given the current climate in Hollywood with everything that’s been going on?

AS: Yeah, I mean, obviously it was on my mind, exploring the tricky message of power dynamics and how the abuse of power in certain situations, especially in sexual situations can get very sticky and confusing and blur the lines of professionalism versus personal. And I think that there’s an emergence in a very good way of it being on women’s minds and women coming forward and speaking about it. You know, I have fortunately not been in a situation like the ones that the women have been discussing, but I am a woman, and I do have to deal with getting out of very uncomfortable situations. And I’ve thought in the past, “How do I get out of this in a graceful manner?” you know? And that sucks. It sucks that that’s just sort of a normal thing that women now are like, “Yeah, all of us. Me too.” You know, it’s not necessarily–it’s even in subtle forms. And that’s something that I hope that as this continues to unfold, is that we have a discussion about it and that it doesn’t become that we’ve found the monsters and now we’re separated. Because that’s not how it works. It’s the subtle forms that stick around. And then when you can point to someone and be like, “Well, I’m not that extreme, so I’m fine,” it’s these subtle forms of behaviors that we’ve accepted for so long that I think the dialogue should begin with.